As lawmakers and former
intelligence officials defend Trump's CIA pick, civil libertarians argue she
"should be in jail."
President Donald Trump's
decision this week to nominate Gina Haspel—an intelligence official civil
libertarians argue "should
be in jail" for her role in
the Bush administration's torture regime—as the next CIA chief has illuminated
something of a spectrum of torture apologists among America's political elite.
Placing herself firmly on the
far-right end of this spectrum on Tuesday was Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.), daughter
of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who tweeted a proud defense of the CIA's
euphemistically-named torture program at Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who argued
the Senate should closely scrutinize Haspel's role in overseeing the torture of
detainees at U.S. black sites overseas.
In openly praising the Bush
torture regime and the "brave men and women" who carried it out,
Cheney differentiated her position from that of many Washington establishment
figures who have defended Haspel's role in overseeing the Bush torture program
this week, on the grounds that she was merely "following
orders."
For instance, former CIA
director Michael Hayden wrote in
an op-ed for The Hill on Wednesday that Haspel's "role in CIA's
counterterrorism program" should not be cause for concern, as she was
merely doing "nothing more and nothing less than what the nation and the
agency asked her to do."
Highlighting several similar
examples in an articlefor The
Intercept on Thursday, Jon Schwartz argues the defense of Haspel offered
by Hayden, former Obama officials, and some lawmakers is precisely the defense
Nazis used during the Nuremberg trials following the Second World War.
While Nuremberg judges
rejected the "Nuremberg defense" as illegitimate, "many members
of the Washington, D.C. elite are now stating that it, in fact, is a
legitimate defense for American officials who violate international law to
claim they were just following orders," Schwartz writes.
In a tweet on Thursday, Trevor
Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, summarized the
principal narratives of torture apologists—all of which serve to undermine all
attempts to hold those who oversee violations of international law accountable
for their actions.
The rush among the
intelligence establishment to defend Haspel's past comes as civil liberties
groups are ramping up efforts to stop her confirmation. As The Daily Beast's
Spencer Ackerman notes,
these groups "spent Barack Obama's presidency loudly warning that without
prosecutions for torture, it will be a matter of time before torture
returns."
Now that the U.S. has a
president who campaigned
on bringing back torture, the effort to block Haspel is "a fight
[rights groups] feel compelled to wage," Ackerman writes.
"Gina Haspel dishonored
our country and disgraced herself by participating in the CIA torture program
and the destruction of criminal evidence," Wells Dixon of the Center on
Constitutional Rights, told The Daily Beast. "We do not believe she
should be director of the CIA. Rather, she should be in jail."
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